“Grown first in Eritrea, Ethiopia, and the highlands of Sudan, okra traveled to India long before it made its way to the Americas as part of the transatlantic slave trade. Slaves, who had been brought to America from various regions of Africa and spoke different languages, cultivated community around this food which reminded them of home and of a time when they were free. 

For my Pakistani grandmother, okra was a reminder of her former bucolic childhood in Aligarh, India, before the violence and migration of 1947. In the ’90s and early 2000s, okra was a go-to dish for my mother who worked as a school teacher. Every day she would drive all five of her children back from school in the Karachi heat, then rush to the kitchen and have lunch ready for us within 30-minutes. Years later, okra was one of the first dishes we served at Ruby’s Kitchen. In the midst of a pandemic, I am reminded that this dish is a great staple during times of food scarcity. It works even if you’re missing the main ingredient—just substitute with eggplant or squash!”

RUBY JAWAID is a special education teacher, a volunteer for New York Cares, and a loving mom whose parents immigrated to Karachi, Pakistan, from Aligarh, India, during the partition of 1947.  When her parents passed in 2018, she created a handmade recipe book to preserve her mother’s precious recipes. WAQAS JAWAID is a Pakstani American architect and a partner at Isometric, a graphic and exhibition design studio committed to promoting inclusion, equality, and progress in visual culture and the built environment. In 2019, Ruby and her son Waqas co-founded Ruby’s Kitchen, a once-a-month Pakistani tasting menu brunch in Brooklyn, NYC.

May 10, 2020. Illustration by Thu Tran.